Show Summary

Most real estate investors don’t understand the importance of building their personal ‘brand’ in this business. We’re not necessarily talking about the name of your company, but how you treat people, if you do what you say you’ll do, and if you’re top of mind when others have a deal. Imran Clark and Darrell Kucan tell us more in this FlipNerd.com expert interview, and some simple steps will absolutely make a difference in your business. We also talk about the importance of networking, and how critical your involvement in your local REI clubs is to your success.

Highlights of this show

  • Meet Imran Clark and Darrell Kucan, and hear their story of how they started with nothing but a desire to be successful in real estate investing.
  • Join the discussion on the power of build your personal brand and reputation.
  • Listen to their take on the importance of networking to do more deals and achieve your goals.

Resources and Links from this show:

Listen to the Audio Version of this Episode

FlipNerd Show Transcript:

Mike: Welcome to the FlipNerd.com podcast. This is your host, Mike Hambright, and on this show I will introduce you to V.I.P.’s in the real estate investing industry as well as other interesting entrepreneurs whose stories and experiences can help you take your business to the next level. We have three new shows each week which are available in the iTunes store or by visiting FlipNerd.com. So without further ado, let’s get started.
Hey, it’s Mike Hambright with FlipNerd.com. Welcome back for another exciting V.I.P. interview. I interview some of the most successful real estate investing experts and entrepreneurs in our industry to help you learn and grow. Today, I’m joined by two guys, friends of mine, Imran Clark and Darrell Kucan, who are San Diego real estate investors, and they’re also leaders of the San Diego investment club. They’re huge believers in the importance of building your brand and networking and have plenty of examples of how that’s helped them succeed over the last several years in their market. So today we’re going to discuss how you can implement those things in your business, but before we get started, let’s take a moment to recognize our featured sponsors.

Advertisement: RealtyMogul.com is an online market place for real estate investing, connecting borrowers and capital from accredited and institutional investors. Get a rehab loan fast and close in as little as 10 days. Rates start as low as 9%.

We’d also like to thank National Real Estate Insurance Group, the nation’s leading provider of insurance to the residential real estate investor market. From individual properties to large scale investors, National Real Estate Insurance Group is ready to serve you.

Please note, the views and opinions expressed by the individuals in this program do not necessarily reflect those of FlipNerd.com or any of its partners, advertisers or affiliates. Please consult professionals before making any investment or tax decisions as real estate investing can be risky.

Mike: Hey guys, welcome to the show.

Darrell/Imran: Thank you very much. I appreciate you having us.

Mike: You’re going to tag team me today. So why don’t you guys go ahead and introduce yourself before we get started here and talk a little bit about your background, and it’s a fascinating story of the importance of networking and through your RIA club, becoming leaders in a market which just helps you bring more deals your way, more access to money and a lot of things that allows you to kind of help the community benefit as well. But before we get started with that, why don’t you tell us a little bit about each of your backgrounds.

Darrell: I’m Darrell Kucan.

Imran: And Imran Clark.

Darrell: And together we are Kucan and Clark Partners, which we got together back in 2009 and this was after a little bit of real estate education and meeting at an education event and networking. So I think that’s a great topic we’re talking about today, networking and building a team and doing what you say you’re going to do, just having integrity. So I come from a background of property management. First of all, I’m an only child, don’t have any sort of big, giant education as a background. I graduated high school, dabbled in a few little things here and there but realized I’m an entrepreneur, and then when I saw a sign on the side of the road that said, “Real Estate Investor Seeks Apprentice,” I knew that was my calling. So from there, being in the property management side of the business, I was able to look at profit and loss statements and look at how an apartment complex is run. It got me really curious and interested so then I pursued education. That’s where Imran and I met.

Imran: You saw how much money the guy was making, right?

Darrell: So yeah, the guy was making, I think he was netting someplace close to $1 million a month, and that’s the guy that I want to be. So from there, I knew that that was my calling so I went and got educated through that, met Imran, and we decided to partner up and see how that worked. And here we are. Back in 2009 is when we first partnered up. I think we met back in 2007. So that’s a little bit about my background. That’s kind of how I got started.

Imran: And you’ve got kids and you’re married and all that.

Darrell: Yeah, I’ve got three kids, been married for 21 years. So it’s been a ride, being an entrepreneur is definitely not easy. It’s fun, but it’s not easy. I’ve definitely had some hardships. I went through a point where I knew that I was going to make a ton of money in real estate, quit my job, went real estate full time, and had a hard time, and I struggled. And I ended up going homeless, living with my mother-in-law. My mother-in-law every day in my ear would say, “Give up your dream, get a job and get out of my house.” There were a few curse words in there.

Mike: Were they in that same order or did she start with get out of my house and then…?

Darrell: She’d change it up a little bit, but mainly it was give up on your dream. Here what I thought was funny was she was an entrepreneur herself. She runs a transaction coordinating business. So I had something to prove, being homeless. We finally closed our first deal, specializing in short sales. I was able to move up and move out which was fantastic, but it was just that burning desire that you really need as an entrepreneur that you know you’re going to be successful and you don’t let anything get in your way. You make sure to overcome those obstacles and move forward. That’s where I am. Imran?

Imran: I’ve got a very different background than Darrell. So our paths converged, we found out we have very similar aspirations and share a lot of values, and that’s why we make good partners. But my background, I’m the oldest of five so big family. I have parents divorced, remarried, and Dad had a couple more so even oldest of seven, and I was out of the house prior to that. My family, especially my mom’s side, high education focused. So my grandfather on Mom’s side, and he’s still alive, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1997, and I was going to graduate school in biochemistry while he did that so the pressure was on, right? So I ended up, I got my PhD in molecular biology, biochemistry. Mom’s a Master in business. Dad’s a Master in business. Uncle’s a doctor. Aunts and other uncles are lawyers. So it was quality education, right? So we followed that paradigm they talk about, “OK, go to school, get a degree, get a good job,” right? So I did that to the nth degree. I ended up in San Diego doing a post doctorate and from there went on to the biotech industry so I went corporate because I wanted to make more money. Going towards the ivory towers, I wasn’t going to make as much money as soon. So I already kind of had that in my mind, but a job is a job is a job. So biotech out here tanked in 2000 right when I walked into it. I kept losing jobs, starting other ones. There are a lot of small start up companies here in San Diego. In one two-year period I worked three different jobs. … This is insane. We do this, the education and job thing, we’re told that’s security, right?
It’s not, so that was my wake up call. There’s no security in it. I was looking towards retirement someday. There’s no retirement, right? The 401K’s not getting you there no matter how much you stuck in it so I’ve got to do something else. Ultimately, real estate was becoming attractive to me in all this. I saw a similar sign on the road, it was the same group that said, “Investor Seeks Apprentice,” the yellow sign with the black writing. I drove by it. It was in different places in town. I never wrote it down, and then … When I thought I was ready, the signs disappeared. I couldn’t find a number, like oh my God. They waited like a month before putting them back out, and I realize now what they’re doing, it worked to a T. Oh my God, I drove, I parked the car in traffic on almost a freeway, got out and the sign had blown down in the wind, people are honking at me, and I’m writing down this number because I’m not going to sleep at night. It’s my dream, it’s my dream, I’ve got to find this investor who wants apprentices. That turned out to be an education company and they had stuff to sell and all that. That’s where we first met. Now… ’06, ’07 when we first met, but we hadn’t partnered up. We were both going through this education thing together. I didn’t even call that number right away. I had to lose a job. I spent six months looking for work and then totally going out of the box and saying maybe I’ll be a consultant for hedge funds that want to invest in biotech companies, I don’t know, anything. I open up my desk drawer and there’s this phone number I had written down, and that’s when I called. So that altered my path. Despite all the craziness of what that company was, if you utilized their education, their education was very good. They had a whole sales aspect to it. So long story short, Darrell and I had known each other through this for a couple years. We decided that, we kept bumping into each other and stuff, we decided to partner up, and we didn’t go into short sales first right away. We were trying for the quick and easy, pie in the sky, less work more points type stuff, that turned out not to work. We went to another seminar called [inaudible 00:10:24] that were the next county north had been doing short sales for a year, they came down and spoke. And they were showing how they were knocking it out of the park, and we were trained to do the same thing. We avoided it because they take a long time and they’re hard, right? You don’t get paid right away. We saw how much money they were making.

Darrell: We both looked at each other and we’re like this is dumb, what are we doing.

Imran: We’re like, we have two questions that they can answer for us or we can spend a week to get the answer for and we’re set to go. There’s moments in your life when you have all these ah-ha’s and these light switches go on, and they go to varying degrees. This was a night when the switch just really got thrown, ka-chunk, and the key was the decision and the commitment. This is what I tell people. You can think it’s a great idea and the light bulb can go off, but there’s this point where you make such a commitment in yourself and you’re so clear and you know that you can do it. You just go for it and you go do it no matter what. So that night we stayed up until like 4 a.m. at a Denny’s, designed our quick and dirty, got 80% through our website, our business plan and the next day we launched. And we made this commitment. We said in a month we’re going to have 20, I think we said 15 houses under contract. That’s the other thing. You’ve got to take massive action. People go I’m going to try it on one deal or this and that and say it doesn’t work. I’m like, well how many times did you try it? You didn’t give it a statistically relevant sample to do. So we’re getting 15 under contract in a month, we had 20 houses locked in on contract to go, and that’s how we started the business, not onesie or twosy.

Darrell: And we may not have known everything that we needed to know in order to continue doing short sales, we knew the basics. But we knew that if we got the properties under contract then it would become natural what to do next.

Imran: Here’s the thing. We didn’t make money right way. It still took us three or four months before we got paid on the first deal, and we fought tooth and nail for that one. Now it turned into a $56,000 profit while he was homeless, and actually I was paying him a fake paycheck, he gave me the money back, because his mother-in-law was back there. There’s a lot of funny stories in all this, right? But to go from like 0 and banging your head against the wall to all of a sudden 56,000 and 19 more deals in the pipeline, your like, OK, this is cool, this is going to work. And there was a lot of struggle and stuff. We went through, our stories are great for people, the different backgrounds. I went without work for nine months trying to go after my dream with my now ex, see there’s even an ex-wife, we went through all that there’s all that story, begging me to go back and get a job. So when I first pursued this dream, I had to go back and beg my employer for my job back and had my job and did this. What’s amazing is I was still doing this full time with Darrell and somehow I managed to get employee of the year at my job. We never slept. So to start this off, we were literally going 20 hours a day. I would get 4 hours of sleep a night for almost a year to launch our business. Is it worth it? Yeah, after that paycheck, I think it was our third year, we had a $1 million year, net profit year.

Mike: It’s a great lesson. There’s so many people, everybody that I know that’s successful was faced with adversity and they just worked their tail off and they didn’t give up. I can’t really tell you anybody that just consistently got lucky. It was always from hard work and consistently working on stuff, and this is an easy business to get, as you guys know, this is an easy business to get, even industry standards are for straight up deals, I don’t know about short sales, but you’re closing 5% of your leads maybe less for short sales, I don’t know. But that means 95% of the time, you’re told no or the door’s slammed in your face so there’s a lot of opportunities to get negative and say this won’t work. It’s a [inaudible 00:14:41] business.

Imran: You have to separate yourself from that and just make it about numbers. And you hit it, the consistency. No matter what you’re doing, no matter how much or how little that you can commit to, whatever it is, be very consistent. And there’s this weird, there’s this book out there called “The Tipping Point” that I think applied to so much in life. And even for us there’s a practical…

Mike: I’m literally looking at it. I’ve got it sitting right there on my…

Imran: There you go. It’s almost like you have to pay your dues and then all of a sudden things start clicking and working and deals come in. And you’re like, I’m not doing anything different this month than I was four months ago how come it works now? And it just, something tips. You don’t get there unless you are consistent.

Mike: Absolutely.

Darrell: And through this as well we obviously had to get a team together. We went through several title companies, several escrows when launching our business, several contractors

Imran: Contractors.

Darrell: We made a lot of mistakes.

Imran: A couple of other partners that were sour.

Darrell: But through these years of developing our business, we’ve established many relationships. Now these relationships were good for, whether they’re realtors, whether they were other partners that we partnered with, they brought us deals, and through that you realize that this is a people business and you have to work with integrity. I maybe had mentioned this earlier when we were talking, but 85% of our business is referral based.

Mike: That’s incredible.

Darrell: And it’s because of the networking and because of the connection, the relationships that we’ve built throughout the years. We do what we say we’re going to do. If we can’t do it, we say we can’t do it. Go find something else.

Mike: There’s some great lessons in there I think. That’s one of the main things I wanted to talk about today after some initial conversations with you guys is that there’s so many people that don’t, they’re very transaction to transaction, they don’t really think about what’s the bigger picture, how do I build my brand, how do I build my reputation. And you’ve seen it in your market and I’ve seen it in mine, there are people that come and go. They’re like fire ants. They just…

Imran: We’ve partnered with those people where they turn a partnership or a transaction into the most stressful event for everybody else involved because they’re fixating on, they think they’re getting cheated out of $2 when they’re going to make $30,000 on their split or something whatever it is. But people don’t want to work with them again by the end so they may end up getting what they want out of that deal because they rest of us are like just give it to them so we don’t have to work with them anymore. But that’s the last deal they every do with those people that are involved, right?

Darrell: You’ve got to look at the bigger picture. You want to get deals again and again and again from the same people.

Imran: Well that’s branding right there. We started our company, our logo isn’t the best logo you’ve ever seen, but it’s something that people now recognize, Kucan and Clark Partners. And it’s just being in the trenches, it’s going to the networking events, it’s meeting realtors at their open houses, and it’s being out in the field handing out our business cards. One of the things that we like to do is when we’re going after a lead, we call a realtor, we’re like, “That’s great. You have a listing. It looks like something that might work for us; however, we’re not looking for that one house. We’re looking for all the other houses that you have coming up in the future. We want to be your first phone call.”

Darrell: That’s true. It’s like people going oh, do you work off the M.L.S.? Not really but if we go after a house, like you said, we’re not going after the house, we’re going after a relationship with that agent who’s going to have inventory, right? So don’t worry about whether that deal works. Build that relationship. Get that connection. And I might say because there’s a lot of people that watch this, they might just be starting out and be like well, I don’t have my logo and don’t have this, your name is your brand. It’s how we started. Before we ran a club, we were going to these clubs. Before we took on the San Diego Investment Club, it was run by another guy that’s fifteen years ahead of us, a big guru now, retired on all his money. He let us basically take over the club because he trusted us to maintain the integrity. But before that, we were just members showing up and I can attribute to the year before we took it over at least $100,000 or $200,000 of our net profit.

Imran: Revenue.

Mike: Net profits.

Darrell: Say like at average a $75K paycheck for him for the year, $75K that I think came just from going to that club never mind everything else that was going on. Was it worth it going to that club and networking with these people? And even then we had a brand just on Darrell Kucan and Imran Clark because knew that we did this, they had partnered with us, we did what we said we were going to do. So just that integrity.

Imran: We didn’t come up with something creative like “Best House Flippers L.L.C.” It’s Kucan and Clark.

Darrell: Have a strong brand, a strong name. People use things like integrity and this and get out there. It’s real simple, just be transparent and stick to your word and don’t worry about problems. Problems always show up but have good communication so that when these things do come up, you’re very communicative, you’re honest about it, you’re solution oriented or maybe it’s a [cluster fuck]. But everybody says it’s, you know, things happen. Just be everything above the table.

Mike: Yeah, I think that’s important. Communication stuff is, I think if people know, there tend to be nasty closings, there’s a lot of stuff that’s not, I don’t know anything that is smooth in this business, but…

Darrell: I worry when it’s too smooth.

Mike: Yeah, something’s not, they’re not talking so something must be bad, but I think a big part of your brand has nothing to do with a logo, that’s something people could [inaudible 00:20:56]. It is your reputation and it’s how you present yourself. It’s your hustle. If people see you everywhere, you become top of mind, and that’s your brand. That’s how you branded yourself is I’m the go to guy or guys because we’re getting it done.

Darrell: What makes it nice for us is there are two [inaudible 00:21:17] so we do define our roles and separate ourselves. I’m more on the marketing side of it. Part of what I knew that could be huge for us is we did a lot of marketing, we built a website, we were on social media. It got way too overwhelming for me because marketing, you see the big, giant companies, they spend 50% of their budget on marketing, right? Coca-Cola 50%, right? But they’re the Number 1 in the world. So I knew that marketing was going to be huge for us. I learned a lot from social media. I didn’t know a lot, but by doing it, it got to the point where I knew what I was doing enough. It was taking more of my time that we could now hand that off, and we built our business big enough to where we now have somebody that does our social media marketing for us. But it’s still an integral part of our business because like you said, it keeps people on the front of their mind, and like Imran said before, hey, it’s been 60 or 90 days where will I find Kucan and Clark’s number because I want to call them and partner on the deal with them. Well, if you’re following up with them on a consistent basis, they’re going to be able to find your number immediately and give you a call and you get a deal.

Imran: Yeah, and then like you said, on the other end I’m a stronger believer in, I think the social media and all of that, getting whatever [inaudible 00:22:31] stuff out there serves it’s purpose and is important especially when you’re around longer and growing bigger, but I think more, especially in the beginning…

Darrell: It’s face time.

Imran: It’s just the people that you know. You’re out there and you’re hustling then you’re going to start putting stuff under contract; whether it works out or not if you have integrity through it, you start closing deals. Those are the folks that are going to be your biggest spokespeople, and they don’t need to yell from the [inaudible 00:23:02] at everybody. They just need to talk to their neighbor or their nephew that’s going through a situation that they need to sell a house. Oh, I just worked with these guys. And that’s really where one will lead to another will lead to another and that’s really…

Darrell: Organic.

Imran: Yeah, much more organic, and I think that’s really where to start. With all this media and advertising and everything that goes on that’s going to brand you and make people, you need to have some kind of a foundation, an anchor, and that’s going to really come from who have you done business with and what have you done. Because you can put a bunch of stuff out there and if it’s not connected to something that’s rooted to something real, it’ll disappear real quick too.

Darrell: It’s pie in the sky. People blow it off.

Imran: So I think they’ll think having that hustle, and that never stops.

Darrell: We kind of came on the scene pretty big. One day we weren’t around and the next day people were like, “Oh, you guys are Kucan and Clark. I’ve seen your videos.” One of the things we do is we do rehab videos so we do a before, during and after, and it not only helps us, we can go back and look at those things but again, we realize that the more we give, the more you can receive. So by giving out these videos, hey, here’s the before, during and after, here’s what we did to the property, hopefully you guys can take something from it, it really helps kind of launch us in a way. We’d show up to our networking events, a couple around here in San Diego, and people started recognizing us. That’s when the brand really took off. We partnered with a lot of people at the clubs and [inaudible 00:24:40].

Mike: So you guys have used it as a tool for continuing to build your brand, to build knowledge that you exist. You guys are very giving in your club, I know that. Talk about for other people that are listening that are either members of a club or of multiple clubs or maybe even considering starting their own club, these things have to be launch pads for people reciprocating their knowledge, right? That’s the best part of this industry when it works well is that people learn and then they eventually teach others what they’ve learned and help other people out. So talk about the importance of that to be successful in real estate investing and then maybe give some advice on how people can kind of implement some of that.

Imran: Take massive action. First, show up, find your local REIA clubs. There are about three big ones here in San Diego. We run the San Diego Investment Club so if you want to take a look go to sandiegoinvestmentclub.com or…

Darrell: Google it.

Mike: We’ll add a link down below the video here too.

Imran: In other markets, generally there’s going to be something in the bigger markets, so go find them, show up, and start networking. Find out what other people do. Let other people know what you do. If you buy and rehab properties, tell everybody that’s what you do. Eventually you’re going to get to the point where you’re known, you become friends with people, and take your business to the next level.

Darrell: And starting out, we didn’t really know about the REIA clubs when we first started out. We were just out on our own, and I think we would have gotten further faster if we had realized that there is this whole network…

Imran: Secret society, it’s not so secret. They just don’t advertise on T.V. or anything, but they’re all there. They’re all open to the public, and they’re all usually like $20 at the door to help pay for the room or whatever, but they’re very, very affordable.

Darrel: About the best $20 you’re ever going to spend by the way.

Imran: A lot of them have libraries. Everybody says you can learn from the library which books should I get. Well, they have the best ones already there and they’re a small library, right? But just starting out, I’ve never flipped a house before, I’ve never wholesaled before, well, you’re going to want to go to these. One, you’re going to learn stuff. You’re going to want to talk to as many people. That’s how you’re going to brand yourself even as a newbie. They come to us and if they’re really motivated and they want to get out there and say, “Can I work with you guys? I’ve never done anything before.” We’ll get you started, and you’re going to start going out and bird dogging. You’re going to roll up your sleeves. You’re going to climb, but that’s what you do. That’s what we had to do to build our business. And now you’re going to have somebody that will partner with you. You can either refer it and get paid, wholesale it. The way you work your way up is you do more and more of the heavy lifting, and we actually have it worked out now where we have a strata of people where they work themselves up to a 50/50 partner with us where they, through practice and us coaching them, they get to where they can actually negotiate and lock down under contract and have the right valuation, the right A.R.V. to get it under contract and they basically have it on a silver platter, but they may not have the financial resources and the rehab resources. Bring it to us. We’ll partner. That’s a 50/50 partner all day long. We’ll go in, you did all the front end work, we’ll do the back. So if you’re like, “How do I get started? I don’t have the money. I don’t have the resources.” You’re going to find these people at these clubs.

Darrell: Perfect example, we have a gentleman who just came to us, actually he’s been bugging us for weeks, we finally had a sit down with him. He’s like, “I am going to do everything it takes. I don’t want to get paid. I just want to work with you guys. I’ll work for you guys and do whatever it takes because I need to learn this business.” So if you’re new and you really want to do something, volunteer your time and spend your time with professionals that know what they’re doing.

Imran: That’s a good point. Very rarely is some guru investor going to take some young apprentice under their, they just don’t have time. Everybody wants to do that, right? But if you can find a way where you keep, instead of saying what can I get out of this person, what you can bring to them to help further their business or make their life easier, they may even just drop some sage nuggets on you. You might not even realize what a nugget is until you’re two years into doing something else in your business, but you wrote it down, you remembered, you’re like oh, this fits in here. And all a sudden you just jumped a whole year ahead of everybody else because you were around for that guys who’s probably dead now, right?

Mike: There’s so many people that I think don’t come at it from that angle of what you just said. It’s they’re just trying to take instead of give and it’s hard to be successful. And even if you are, that’s probably more luck and a one off than something sustainable. And the other thing that I would say from my experience in REIA clubs is that because real estate investing tends to be a very isolated and kind of lonely business where everybody’s out doing their own thing, they may come together for a meeting once a month, that a lot of people with a lot of knowledge are usually, if they’re coming to those meetings, they’ve carved that time out to kind of purge and share what I know. There are people all the time that try to contact me and it’s frustrating because I used to go meet somebody for coffee and things, but I just can’t do that anymore because my whole life would be gone. But now I say, hey, I’m going to be at this place for an hour at this time, and no holds barred, no bars hold, I can’t remember that saying. I’m just going to let it fly and I’m going to try to learn to. But I just think that that’s how a lot of people are so they’re great opportunities to learn and try to share information. And people would be surprised at how much some folks are willing to give away if you get them at the right time and the right location.

Darrell: And that’s why I really enjoy running this particular club here at the San Diego Investment Club. The speakers that get on stage, they’re masters in their field. They’re tax experts or legal experts or real estate experts. They’re willing to get on stage and give everything that they know that they can within the one hour that they’re on stage of course, but they’re willing to give this because they understand the whole philosophy of the more you give, the more you get.

Imran: And they’re very hard to access outside of the club like you said. They’re very busy or maybe very private people so now you’ve got them for this period so take advantage.

Darrell: Take advantage of it.

Mike: Well guys, we’re kind of at the end of our time here, but any kind of final thoughts on how people can do a better job of networking and focus on building their brand and reputation to help further their career and their business, regardless of where they are, if they’re brand new or they’ve been doing this for a while.

Darrell: I think we just touched on it. I think by networking, make sure you’re out to give and not out to take.

Imran: Get out there, the massive action, the hustle, keep going, keep going keep going, but don’t get caught in a loop where you’re not doing anything. Take the action, get involved, be a participator, a contributor, don’t be a pain in the ass for everybody if you end up in a partnership. All relationships are great in the beginning, but whenever any kind of a stress enters from whatever, a rehab goes over or who knows, that’s where character is tested. So have character so you’re one of those people where you try to bring everybody together, that solves situations and how everybody’s going to get out and still make money. Just work with people. It is a people business.

Darrell: It’s a people business and we’re in the business of solving problems.

Imran: Solve problems and ultimately I liken it to if I’m going to go buy a car, you don’t have to sell me on buying a car. I’m driving out of these lots knowing I’m going to buy a car. Who am I going to buy it from? Ultimately, it’s going to be the salesperson that I clique with and that I like because I already 90% know what it is that I want. So who am I going to work with? So you want to be the person that people want to work with.

Mike: That’s a great tip.

Darrell: You don’t have to convince people to sell their house. They came to you because they want to sell. Be the one they want to sell to.

Mike: The significance of what you just said for people listening too, I know you guys know this well and I know it well, is that it’s so often that we buy a house months or even years after we made that first offer and if you didn’t have a good relationship with that person, there’s so many people that have been procrastinating for years and they’re going to procrastinate for another year or two or months until the pain is more and if you didn’t build a relationship with them and they don’t trust you and you don’t stay top of mind then you’re not going to get that deal when the opportunity comes back around.

Imran: It’s something we’ve been kind of bad at in the past and we’re getting better at now is you need to maintain that relationship. If you made a relationship with somebody a year ago whether it’s a seller or whether it’s a potential partner in your business, they’re not going to remember you when they need you for a particular service that they would need you for. It’s going to be who’s most recent in their brain so follow up. Keep letting these people know, OK, just checking on you. It can be in random ways, not are you ready to work with me yet. It can be just saying hi or send a Christmas card, but now they remember your name and connect you to this particular service.

Darrell: That goes for your whole network, not just sellers. That goes for people that are selling homes, real estate agents and other real estate investors. So that’s part of your hustle you talked about.

Mike: Well guys, thanks so much for joining today. We’re going to add a link down below for the San Diego Investment Club so if you want to learn more about the great work these guys are doing and you’re in the San Diego area, you should check them out. Thanks so much for joining today guys.

Imran: We really appreciate you having us.

Darrell: Thanks Mike.

Mike: Stay in touch. I’m sure I’ll be seeing you guys soon one way or another.

Darrell: Looking forward to it.

Announcer: Thanks for joining us on today’s FlipNerd.com podcast. To listen to more of our shows and hear from incredible guests, please access all of our podcasts in the iTunes store. You can also watch the video versions of our shows by visiting us at FlipNerd.com.

 

Copy link
Powered by Social Snap